INHERITANCE

DESCRIPTION

The purpose of the PPIx-Regexp package is to parse regular expressions in a manner similar to the way the PPI package parses Perl. This class forms the root of the parse tree, playing a role similar to PPI::Document.

This package shares with PPI the property of being round-trip safe. That is,

Navigation is similar to that provided by PPI. That is to say, things like children, find_first, snext_sibling and so on all work pretty much the same way as in PPI.

The class hierarchy is also similar to PPI. Except for some utility classes (the dumper, the lexer, and the tokenizer) all classes are descended from PPIx::Regexp::Element, which provides basic navigation. Tokens are descended from PPIx::Regexp::Token, which provides content. All containers are descended from PPIx::Regexp::Node, which provides for children, and all structure elements are descended from PPIx::Regexp::Structure, which provides beginning and ending delimiters, and a type.

There are two features of PPI that this package does not provide - mutability and operator overloading. There are no plans for serious mutability, though something like PPI's prune functionality might be considered. Similarly there are no plans for operator overloading, which appears to the author to represent a performance hit for little tangible gain.

NOTICE

The author will attempt to preserve the documented interface, but if the interface needs to change to correct some egregiously bad design or implementation decision, then it will change. Any incompatible changes will go through a deprecation cycle.

The goal of this package is to parse well-formed regular expressions correctly. A secondary goal is not to blow up on ill-formed regular expressions. The correct identification and characterization of ill-formed regular expressions is not a goal of this package, nor is the consistent parsing of ill-formed regular expressions from release to release.

This policy attempts to track features in development releases as well as public releases. However, features added in a development release and then removed before the next production release will not be tracked, and any functionality relating to such features will be removed. The issue here is the potential re-use (with different semantics) of syntax that did not make it into the production release.

From time to time the Perl regular expression engine changes in ways that change the parse of a given regular expression. When these changes occur, PPIx::Regexp will be changed to produce the more modern parse. Known examples of this include:

$( no longer interpolates as of Perl 5.005, per perl5005delta.

Newer Perls seem to parse this as qr{$} (i.e. and end-of-string or newline assertion) followed by an open parenthesis, and that is what PPIx::Regexp does.

$) and $| also seem to parse as the $ assertion

followed by the relevant meta-character, though I have no documentation reference for this.

@+ and @- no longer interpolate as of Perl 5.9.4

per perl594delta. Subsequent Perls treat @+ as a quantified literal and @- as two literals, and that is what PPIx::Regexp does. Note that subscripted references to these arrays do interpolate, and are so parsed by PPIx::Regexp.

Only space and horizontal tab are whitespace as of Perl 5.23.4

when inside a bracketed character class inside an extended bracketed character class, per perl5234delta. Formerly any white space character parsed as whitespace. This change in PPIx::Regexp will be reverted if the change in Perl does not make it into Perl 5.24.0.

There are very probably other examples of this. When they come to light they will be documented as producing the modern parse, and the code modified to produce this parse if necessary.

The functionality that parses string literals (the parse argument to new()) was introduced in version 0.045, and should be considered experimental. It is a bit of a kluge in any case, especially in the appropriateness of class names to this use. But the actual parsing of a Perl string literal is not too different than the parsing of an s/// replacement string, so I thought that if someone wanted a string literal parse badly enough to deal with the kluginess I could provide it fairly easily.

METHODS

This class provides the following public methods. Methods not documented here are private, and unsupported in the sense that the author reserves the right to change or remove them without notice.

Whatever form the argument takes, it is assumed to consist entirely of a valid match, substitution, or qr<> string.

Optionally you can pass one or more name/value pairs after the regular expression. The possible options are:

default_modifiers array_reference

This option specifies a reference to an array of default modifiers to apply to the regular expression being parsed. Each modifier is specified as a string. Any actual modifiers found supersede the defaults.

When applying the defaults, '?' and '/' are completely ignored, and '^' is ignored unless it occurs at the beginning of the modifier. The first dash ('-') causes subsequent modifiers to be negated.

So, for example, if you wish to produce a PPIx::Regexp object representing the regular expression in

use re '/smx';
{
no re '/x';
m/ foo /;
}

you would (after some help from PPI in finding the relevant statements), do something like

This option specifies the encoding of the regular expression. This is passed to the tokenizer, which will decode the regular expression string before it tokenizes it. For example:

my $re = PPIx::Regexp->new( '/foo/',
encoding => 'iso-8859-1',
);

parse parse_type

This option specifies what kind of parse is to be done. Possible values are 'regex', 'string', or 'guess'. Any value but 'regex' is experimental.

If 'regex' is specified, the first argument is expected to be a valid regex, and parsed as though it were.

If 'string' is specified, the first argument is expected to be a valid string literal and parsed as such. The return is still a PPIx::Regexp object, but the regular_expression() and modifier() methods return nothing, and the replacement() method returns the content of the string.

If 'guess' is specified, this method will try to guess what the first argument is. If the first argument is a PPI::Element, the guess will reflect the PPI parse. But the guess can be wrong if the first argument is a string representing an unusually-delimited regex. For example, 'guess' will parse "foo" as a string, but Perl will parse it as a regex if preceded by a regex binding operator (e.g. $x =~ "foo"), as shown by

perl -MO=Deparse -e '$x =~ "foo"'

which prints

$x =~ /foo/u

under Perl 5.22.0.

The default is 'regex'.

postderef boolean

This option is passed on to the tokenizer, where it specifies whether postfix dereferences are recognized in interpolations and code. This experimental feature was introduced in Perl 5.19.5.

The default is the value of $PPIx::Regexp::Tokenizer::DEFAULT_POSTDEREF, which is true. When originally introduced this was false, but was documented as becoming true when and if postfix dereferencing became mainstream. The intent to mainstream was announced with Perl 5.23.1, and became official (so to speak) with Perl 5.24.0, so the default became true with PPIx::Regexp 0.049_01.

Note that if PPI starts unconditionally recognizing postfix dereferences, this argument will immediately become ignored, and will be put through a deprecation cycle and removed.

strict boolean

This option is passed on to the tokenizer and lexer, where it specifies whether the parse should assume use re 'strict' is in effect.

The 'strict' pragma was introduced in Perl 5.22, and its documentation says that it is experimental, and that there is no commitment to backward compatibility. The same applies to the parse produced when this option is asserted. Also, the usual caveat applies: if use re 'strict' ends up being retracted, this option and all related functionality will be also.

Given the nature of use re 'strict', you should expect that if you assert this option, regular expressions that previously parsed without error might no longer do so. If an element ends up being declared an error because this option is set, its perl_version_introduced() will be the Perl version at which use re 'strict' started rejecting these elements.

The default is false.

trace number

If greater than zero, this option causes trace output from the parse. The author reserves the right to change or eliminate this without notice.

Passing optional input other than the above is not an error, but neither is it supported.

new_from_cache

This static method wraps "new" in a caching mechanism. Only one object will be generated for a given PPI::Element, no matter how many times this method is called. Calls after the first for a given PPI::Element simply return the same PPIx::Regexp object.

When the PPIx::Regexp object is returned from cache, the values of the optional arguments are ignored.

Calls to this method with the regular expression in a string rather than a PPI::Element will not be cached.

Caveat: This method is provided for code like Perl::Critic which might instantiate the same object multiple times. The cache will persist until "flush_cache" is called.

delimiters

When called in list context, this method returns either one or two strings, depending on whether the parsed expression has a replacement string. In the case of non-bracketed substitutions, the start delimiter of the replacement string is considered to be the same as its finish delimiter, as illustrated by the above example.

When called in scalar context, you get the delimiters of the regular expression; that is, element 0 of the array that is returned in list context.

Optionally, you can pass an index value and the corresponding delimiters will be returned; index 0 represents the regular expression's delimiters, and index 1 represents the replacement string's delimiters, which may be undef. For example,

print PPIx::Regexp->new('s{foo}<bar>')->delimiters(1);
# prints '<>'

If the object was not initialized with a valid regexp of some sort, the results of this method are undefined.

errstr

This static method returns the error string from the most recent attempt to instantiate a PPIx::Regexp. It will be undef if the most recent attempt succeeded.

failures

print "There were ", $re->failures(), " parse failures\n";

This method returns the number of parse failures. This is a count of the number of unknown tokens plus the number of unterminated structures plus the number of unmatched right brackets of any sort.

modifier

This method retrieves the modifier of the object. This comes from the end of the initializing string or object and will be a PPIx::Regexp::Token::Modifier.

Note that this object represents the actual modifiers present on the regexp, and does not take into account any that may have been applied by default (i.e. via the default_modifiers argument to new()). For something that takes account of default modifiers, see modifier_asserted(), below.

In the event of a parse failure, there may not be a modifier present, in which case nothing is returned.

modifier_asserted

This method returns true if the given modifier is asserted for the regexp, whether explicitly or by the modifiers passed in the default_modifiers argument.

Starting with version 0.036_01, if the argument is a single-character modifier followed by an asterisk (intended as a wild card character), the return is the number of times that modifier appears. In this case an exception will be thrown if you specify a multi-character modifier (e.g. 'ee*'), or if you specify one of the match semantics modifiers (e.g. 'a*').

replacement

This method returns that portion of the object which represents the replacement string. This will be undef unless the regular expression actually has a replacement string. Delimiters will be included, but there will be no beginning delimiter unless the regular expression was bracketed.

source

my $source = $re->source();

This method returns the object or string that was used to instantiate the object.

type

This method retrieves the type of the object. This comes from the beginning of the initializing string or object, and will be a PPIx::Regexp::Token::Structure whose content is one of 's', 'm', 'qr', or ''.

RESTRICTIONS

By the nature of this module, it is never going to get everything right. Many of the known problem areas involve interpolations one way or another.

Ambiguous Syntax

Perl's regular expressions contain cases where the syntax is ambiguous. A particularly egregious example is an interpolation followed by square or curly brackets, for example $foo[...]. There is nothing in the syntax to say whether the programmer wanted to interpolate an element of array @foo, or whether he wanted to interpolate scalar $foo, and then follow that interpolation by a character class.

The perlop documentation notes that in this case what Perl does is to guess. That is, it employs various heuristics on the code to try to figure out what the programmer wanted. These heuristics are documented as being undocumented (!) and subject to change without notice.

Given this situation, this module's chances of duplicating every Perl version's interpretation of every regular expression are pretty much nil. What it does now is to assume that square brackets containing only an integer or an interpolation represent a subscript; otherwise they represent a character class. Similarly, curly brackets containing only a bareword or an interpolation are a subscript; otherwise they represent a quantifier.

Changes in Syntax

Sometimes the introduction of new syntax changes the way a regular expression is parsed. For example, the \v character class was introduced in Perl 5.9.5. But it did not represent a syntax error prior to that version of Perl, it was simply parsed as v. So

$ perl -le 'print "v" =~ m/\v/ ? "yes" : "no"'

prints "yes" under Perl 5.8.9, but "no" under 5.10.0. PPIx::Regexp generally assumes the more modern parse in cases like this.

Static Parsing

It is well known that Perl can not be statically parsed. That is, you can not completely parse a piece of Perl code without executing that same code.

Nevertheless, this class is trying to statically parse regular expressions. The main problem with this is that there is no way to know what is being interpolated into the regular expression by an interpolated variable. This is a problem because the interpolated value can change the interpretation of adjacent elements.

This module deals with this by making assumptions about what is in an interpolated variable. These assumptions will not be enumerated here, but in general the principal is to assume the interpolated value does not change the interpretation of the regular expression. For example,

my $foo = 'a-z]';
my $re = qr{[$foo};

is fine with the Perl interpreter, but will confuse the dickens out of this module. Similarly and more usefully, something like

my $mods = 'i';
my $re = qr{(?$mods:foo)};

or maybe

my $mods = 'i';
my $re = qr{(?$mods)$foo};

probably sets a modifier of some sort, and that is how this module interprets it. If the interpolation is not about modifiers, this module will get it wrong. Another such semi-benign example is

my $foo = $] >= 5.010 ? '?<foo>' : '';
my $re = qr{($foo\w+)};

which will parse, but this module will never realize that it might be looking at a named capture.

Non-Standard Syntax

There are modules out there that alter the syntax of Perl. If the syntax of a regular expression is altered, this module has no way to understand that it has been altered, much less to adapt to the alteration. The following modules are known to cause problems: